Conference

On July 5th Robots in Architecture held a one-day-only robot workshop at the CAAD Futures 2011 conference. We really had to compress many topics into a single day…with a long lunch break! Fortunately, we had really enthusiastic participants (Thank you Aurelie, Chengyu, Daniel, Dermott, Emmanouil, Juan Manuel, Pankaja, Peter, Rivka, and Sebastian!) and had a great time going from parametric design to direct robotic fabrication in just a few hours.

For the design of parametric shading panels we prepared aluminium sheets for each participant and then used our KUKA robot to parametrically punch the individual patterns into the material – while this may sound simple, many factors such as toolpath layout, reachability, geometry, design and kinematics had to be considered.

We’ve uploaded the workshop material and prepared a short video of the workshop that also showcases the capabilities of our upcoming KUKA|prc component for Grasshopper – enjoy!

In our paper we show approaches on how to integrate the robot not just in the parametric model, but in the design process itself. The example above is a screenshot (with added captions) directly out of Grasshopper, showing the initially created curves, the resulting modules and finally the stacked wall – side by side with a preview of the toolpaths, including the possibility to simulate the end-effector movements and extract KRL (KUKA Robot Language) code. It’s all running very fluently, allowing you to quickly iterate alternatives, both in respect to design and production. Finally, due to the KRL code generation, you can also rapidly output KRL files for mass customization, circumventing the lengthy CAD-CAM-Postprocessor workflow.